Everyone was dressed up, but sometimes dressed up isn't enough. Anything less than a drop-dead sexy gown meant you were underdressed for Saturday's eighth annual Museum of the African Diaspora gala, "The World's Canvas." The crowd gathered at the Palace was shining (with jewels), glittering (with sequins), curvy (with cleavage) and best of all gleaming (with optimism). Colleague Catherine Bigelowwas there, too, and she'll be writing more about the particulars.

What I wanted to focus on is the mood, which - despite the ups and downs of any cultural institution in its infancy - was proud. The atmosphere was both brimming with a feeling of achievement for surviving and radiating gratitude for the people who made it happen, from Belva Davis, who was the engine that chug-chug-chugged and pulled the museum into existence, to Willie Brown, who forged a deal that included space for MoAD in a redevelopment project centered on the Yerba Buena Gardens area.

KRON's Pam Mooreemceed this event, and its chairs were acting executive director Deborah Santanaand Wilkes Bashford, longtime supporter of the institution. We sat at Bashford's table, and I found myself - very happily - next to Danny Glover, who received a Patron of Culture award, and his wife, Brazilian-born education expert Eliane Cavalleiro. Throughout dinner, of course, San Francisco-raised Glover was besieged by well-wishers and snapshot takers, so much so that I didn't quite know whether it would have been polite to just leave him alone to eat when he was between visitors.

The heck with it. The opportunity for conversation - no matter how interrupted - was irresistible. He talked about the years he lived at Central and Fell, he talked about delivering The Chronicle as a teenager, and, perhaps most relevant to the evening, talked about playing Thurgood Marshallin HBO's "Muhammad Ali's Greatest Fight." "There was a breed of lawyers that came out of that period at Howard Law School from 1896 ..." Preparing for the role, he visited Howard, looked at photographs and history, particularly the young lawyers' determination to overturn Plessy v. Ferguson, the 1896 decision that had established the legality of "separate but equal." Glover "wanted to embody" the spirit of those lawyers, and "tried to find a sense of the groundedness of that ... and I had to find the center" of Marshall.

From the stage, he paid homage to Davis, to Brown, and to fellow honoree Alfre Woodard("when you look into Alfre Woodard's eyes, the world comes alive").

"I carry the memory of hundreds of thousands of people," she said. Referring to Africa as the birthplace of the ancestors of not only African Americans but all humans, "You are an old African," she said. "I am an old African. And for that I am truly grateful."

-- The fun is in the going: Nancy Pelosi is scheduled to receive the Champion of Social Justice award at the National Housing Law Project's lunch on Thursday, but planners are worried that she'll be stuck in Washington while the shutdown is in force. Other sticking problems: A sizable number of the 350 people scheduled to attend will be coming from the East Bay, and they may be hampered by a BART strike.

Public transportation? Oh, fiddle-dee-dee. The lead story in the Broadview, student newspaper of the Convent of the Sacred Heart High School, begins by noting that when a sophomore "needs a ride home after school, instead of calling a cab, she takes out her iPhone, opens an app and selects a car. Within minutes a black sedan arrives in front of school and takes her home."

Public Eavesdropping

"When we married, he had a mustache and I had a perm. Now he has a perm and I have a mustache."

Woman of a certain age, overheard over dinner in San Francisco by Amalia Klinger